For your viewing pleasure: ELLE's feature flick recommendations

True Story
Funny, moving, and full of truth, Gus Van Sant's Milk sports great work by Emile Hirsch, James Franco, and Josh Brolin, who locates the lost-boy pathos in an all-American killer. But Sean Penn rules, playing the country's first prominent, openly gay politician, Harvey Milk, as a middle-aged everyman who, finding his courage, transforms his life and countless others'.

Holiday On Ice
With A Christmas Tale, celebrated French director Arnaud Desplechin invites us to choke (partly from laughter) on Christmas dinner with a family no less fascinating for being terminally toxic. Who do you love: Catherine Deneuve's icy matriarch, Mathieu Amalric's alcoholic scapegoat, or the prettily poisonous sister who lives to take him down?

Bad Religion
Call it heresy, but John Patrick Shanley's Doubt outshines his Pulitzer-winning play. As the authoritarian nun who sees sin in a priest's concern for a schoolboy, Meryl Streep is chilling, fierce, and Oscar-bound. Philip Seymour Hoffman as the angry, worried priest and Amy Adams as the gentle nun who started it all perform with uncommon grace.

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